


The Line

by nicasio_silang



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-19 23:46:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2407334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It'll happen, one way or another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Line

One time, Abbie dies that day in the woods. Her mother is given leave from Tarrytown Psychiatric to attend her daughter’s funeral and tosses more than just dirt onto the coffin. Abbie wakes up a teenager on a cold dawn in 2198 and claws her way out of the forgotten ruin of a municipal grave at the edge of the ocean in the eastern half of a metropolis that’s swallowed New York City, Boston, Albany, and Syracuse. 

Alone, unimmunized, unfathomably lost, she finds her fellow Witness in a triage nurse in Keepsy. Abbie watches every movement as the nurse presses injection after injection painlessly against her skin. 

“You don’t believe me,” she says, voice higher than she wants it. 

“Should I?” The nurse raises an eyebrow. 

“I don’t know. I don’t know if this is real. It doesn’t look like Poughkeepsie.”

“Ah, you know, that’s what they used to call this neighborhood.”

“And I saw something,” Abbie goes on. “I saw something awful.” The nurse nods, expecting as much. “You already think I’m crazy, but this… It had horns and hooves. Eyes like empty wells. I tried to fight it, and I tried to keep my sister behind me, but it touched me and I...went away. I just fell away.”

The nurse’s name is Tes and when she was 12 years old she went scavenging by the shoreline. An isolated cove where nearly every windmill and platform over the water was out of sight, where the air tasted crisp and green. She sat on a rusted girder and peeled off her boots to dig her toes into the pebbled sand. Five toes, then ten, then a hot, aching haze at the edge of the water and a shape forming out of the foam. Tes wanted to run, but her boots were off and her feet were city-soft. Static everywhere and the hair on her nape rose, the thing in the foam rose, and it looked right into her eyes. Her hand stills on Abbie’s arm. 

Abbie never betrays Jenny, and never sees her father figure brutally killed. She doesn’t watch her mother wither and die. She’s very young, small as she’ll ever be, but she carries less. They save Jenny from Purgatory, then Tes and Abbie save the world. By the time they ring in 2205, Abbie is a full-grown woman and she feels, as much as she ever will, at home.

 

Once, the timing is all off. Ichabod wakes up, drags himself from his tomb, and staggers out to meet the world of 2063. 

Abbie is in her 80’s, in decent health, at least physically. She hasn’t seen her sister in more than a few decades. It’s a yawning pit that’s lived in her guts, and she’s marched towards it for all this time. She went to Quantico, then to field offices, mainly in the southwest. She married; he died. She retired back to Sleepy Hollow, and she honestly couldn’t say why. Missed the turn of the leaves, maybe. Missed decent seafood and the lull of the Hudson. 

She’s sitting by the river one day when she sees a strange man struggle by, head-to-toe in dirt and dust. It certainly isn’t her problem, but she’s curious. That old feeling, too, of following a hunch just because. She tries to trail him, but his legs are too long and her knees are too old. Abbie calls it in, and soon enough hears the sirens a couple blocks down. It feels good, it feels okay, to have done a little something again.

A few days later there’s a piece in the paper about a man who broke out of Tarrytown, fought an unknown assailant by the old Dutch churchyard, and expired in the back of an ambulance, raving to the last. Abbie doesn’t read it. 

 

Now and then, it’s Katrina. She says the words over her own failing body and dies in a bitter fire. She pulls herself from the ground, she pulls her tools from the archives and the sewers. She finds Abbie and shows her what can be seen through a mirror. Corbin is dead, Jenny gets free, Irving falls in line. Ichabod is dead, simply dead, and when Abbie asks if Katrina left anyone behind in the past, anyone special, she smiles, she winces, and she doesn’t answer. Abbie doesn't pry; it's not their way. 

 

Once, just once, Jenny lies. They both get to go home, or back to the foster home at any rate. Corbin, just Officer Corbin, comes by to interview the girls. A follow-up to check in on them. He asks their foster mother if she could possibly scare up a cup of coffee for him, then he turns to Abbie and Jenny.

“If you want to tell me what you really saw, then I promise you that I won’t share it with another soul.”

Ichabod never wakes up. There’s no need.

 

There are many times when Ichabod wakes strangely. Magic is rarely exact, and it will take its own toll on organic matter, as well as on the mind. Ichabod wakes up asphyxiating, wakes up speaking in tongues, wakes up bleeding from the chest, a gushing pour of it that never runs dry. He wakes too unhinged to adjust, too afraid to understand, too heartsick to care. He wakes up many, many times only to be felled within weeks or months by illness. He wakes up decapitated, wakes up and falls to pieces before he can breathe to scream, wakes up craving the succor of human flesh, wakes up a narcoleptic, or seemingly so, falling in and out of the world, tripping over the centuries as often as the curb. 

He wakes up amnesiac to become a John Doe and begin a life started late and from scratch. Abbie pulls him over for speeding. He smiles it down to a warning. 

Ichabod has shot Abbie, strangled her, knocked her head against crumbling stone foundations more than once. He’s handed her to Moloch with a passionate hate, he’s kissed her, long and lingering, as they parted in a field of death, he’s left her alone through carelessness or self-sacrifice, he’s despised the sight of her with more strength than he knew himself capable of. He’s disappointed her, and sometimes has lived to feel ashamed.

Abbie has shot Ichabod in: the neck, the hand, the torso a dozen times, the head too many times to count, the leg, the other leg, and once, memorably, in the rear end. She’s bludgeoned him, blinded him, dismembered him for reasons outlined in an ancient tome, she’s plucked out his eyeballs, she’s crushed his instep over and over. There is, however, no time when Abbie has handed him over to Moloch. There is a limit, even to this.

 

Sometimes there’s a day like today. Clear sky, red leaves, too many crows crowding onto the power lines, but hours still until dusk. One slice of pie on the table in the first booth on the left, thin diner napkins wilting under two mugs of hot, black coffee. Abbie and Ichabod, the yawning drop waiting below the both of them, but okay for now, alive today. 

“Go on,” she says. 

She’s been watching a question curling its way around the spoon in his mouth. He sets the silverware down. Raps each finger on the surface next, a twitch that makes her shake her head.

“What are we listening to?” He says. Abbie draws her shoulders in, frowns.

“It’s not, I mean if Irving trusts this woman then I trust his judgement, but-”

“You mistake me,” he says. A gesture to the jukebox. “The music.”

“Oh! Oh, hah.” She needs to pause and listen. “Springsteen.”

“Is that an, ah, a genre, or…?”

“It’s a guy, Bruce Springsteen. The boss. Don’t know the name of this one, but I recognize his voice.” She reaches out and briefly taps his tapping fingers. “Why, do you like it?”

Sometimes they talk about how liking or not liking never comes into the picture. Either they live through it, then they live through it again, or they don’t. Sometimes he’ll talk about cannon fire, or she’ll talk about fireworks, and they’ll work out the difference between a tune and a song, the one that lilts along one line and the other that buffets their bodies like a wind at the top of a mountain. Today he nods. 

“Yes, I rather do.”

A smile takes her. 

“Look at you. You’re a New York boy after all.” She takes the last bite of apple pie. “I like this one too.”

**Author's Note:**

> It's _Atlantic City_ , okay, they're listening to _Atlantic City_.


End file.
